I had 8 bit machines (Spectrum and C64) and then got an Amiga A500. I remember at the time being nothing short of appalled by CGA[0] colour palettes, since CGA was still pretty commonplace in the late 80s and even the early 90s (e.g., at school).

It cemented an opinion that PC hardware of the era was overpriced, underperforming, and uninteresting.

I’ve subsequently developed a healthy respect for what developers and artists have been able to achieve within the constraints of CGA but I have no nostalgia for it. The CGA demoscene is very much worth checking out though - loads of super impressive videos on YouTube.

[0] We used to refer to CGA as Crap Graphics Array, and I seriously doubt we were alone.

It is weird now that you mention it. I worked in C# and .NET for a long time. In theory for 20 years. In practice I wasn't writing much C# after 2019 even though the team I led still used it.

I guess I... just got bored of it, and fed up of Microsoft. I came to hate Windows and having to work on Windows so much that it sort of tainted C# for me. I'm not saying I'd never use it again but, whilst it will run cross-platform nowadays, so will loads of other languages and frameworks, so it's never at the top of the list when it comes to choosing something for a new project.

As for TypeScript? Absolutely loathe it. I'll use it professionally when I have to, but I'd never use it for one of my own projects. It's just so ugly I don't even like looking at it. I get why people like it but, for me, it's not enough. If I'm staring at something all day then, I'm sorry, it can't be ugly.

But, strangely, I still use and enjoy VS Code from Microsoft, and have no plans to switch to anything else.

(I also still have an Office subscription - or whatever it is Microsoft are calling that suite nowadays, I don't care - because I still use both Excel and Word fairly frequently. I could probably get by without, but I actually quite like Office - even on the Mac.)

    > As for TypeScript? Absolutely loathe it.

I just write my TS like I write my C#. They are similar enough, IMO. I ended up writing this as a precursor to our team's move from TS to C#: https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/

The main things I don't like about TS are the volatile tooling, bad habits from other devs (not declaring types), compromised ORMs, require lots of package hunting, and module system.

Language is fine, tho.

Ironic that you quit using it because of Windows right around the time you no longer needed to be on Windows to use it.

I needed to be on Windows for work though and, sadly, often still do, so the association is strong.

The thing is, now most things I do target some flavour of Linux - and although I could write C# and target Linux with absolutely no problem - there are a lot of other options that C# has to complete with. Granted those options would also, at least in theory, have been viable options on Windows but it definitely would have felt a bit like paddling against the flow to host Ruby on Rails or Python or whatever on Windows.

And if I want to target command line or desktop with something cross-platform I'm going to compile to a native binary that requires minimal dependencies, so Rust feels like a more natural fit than C#, especially with Microsoft's desktop UI story being such a dog's breakfast (and even more-so when you account for cross-platform).

Again, in a commercial environment, I could imagine using Electron for that sort of thing because that's what most companies do (but because everything I do nowadays is backend, web, or systems integration, I haven't written a desktop app in a commercial context in 13 years, and I haven't written a command line app in that context since just before the pandemic). However, for my own projects I want to hew as closely as possible to my own principles and ideals and, for them, it'll be a cold day in hell before I ship a desktop or command line app that needs some giant runtime like Electron as a dependency.

Again, the point is that C#, whilst in many ways a great language, doesn't come out as the frontrunner.

> If he had stored an important password on a postit on his laptop, would you call that a private matter?

Whoa, whoa, who, whoa, whoa! You know the rules: no leaking next week’s headlines in advance. What kind of outfit do you think we’re running here?

I do agree though: regardless of whether the woman is a Chinese agent or not, and regardless of whether he knew or suspected (I doubt he did), this affair represents a serious lapse in judgement that has implications far beyond his personal life.

If you can be compromised personally, you can certainly be compromised professionally.

I suspect it won’t happen, because it would likely tank the stock, but really he should be thinking about resigning.

Man, fuck this website. Opened on mobile and trying to admire the painting and I get 4 popups in a row obscuring it every few seconds. Fuck whoever designed that and doubly fuck whoever signed off on it. Absolutely abhorrent behaviour that is totally hostile and disrespectful to both the user and to the material being presented.

Just FYI - Firefox mobile cuts this down to one “dismiss without supporting” coverup.

I had to go check with another browser to confirm the nasty behavior you described. Which does happen.

Thanks: I should give it a go. Safari runs really well on iOS but the lack of an adblocker is a real pain. Firefox + ublock origin has been my goto on desktop since before Chrome deprecated Manifest V2 support, so I probably should at least try it on mobile.

If you disrespected them by default-disabling js, your browsing experience would improve at the expense of their metrics.

The trick, I think - at least this has helped me - is not to use the AI to write for me, nor to use it to rewrite my drafts, but is to do the writing myself and to ask it for editorial feedback. This forces me to think through what I’ve written more deeply, and then rewrite it according to that deeper understanding.

I think if I used AI for the actual writing then, (a) there’d be a lot missing, and (b) I’d rob myself of much of the value, in better understanding, of writing myself.

We’re not all the same so YMMV, but this is what I’ve found from using AI in various ways to see if and how it can help with writing.

This is my stance, but I go further to say that that you shouldn't even use it for feedback...

The feedback bit is surely more debatable, but I would argue the initial writing and allowing edits are not.

https://antoaenono.com/write/fragments/writing#:~:text=never...

With respect to seeking feedback, my angle is that: even if you do agree with the feedback then what they do. Are you going to take it as is? Are you going to come up with it and phrase it in your own way?

What next? Next, what if there's a bunch more feedback that you agree with and you incorporate it. Then, where do we go from there?

Can you even go back to (b) and make your own edits at this point? I'm not sure and I worry about a slippery slope where you stray too far from your own original form -- so I landed on not seeking feedback either.

note: this all is definitely under progress and as I'm looking at it it's very noisy with all of the formatting... just finally getting my site put together

also not sure about my fish progress bar hah

For me I take the view that it’s similar to asking a human for feedback. I sift it, ditch what I’m not interested in or don’t agree with, do more research on what might be interesting, then decide what I want to incorporate and rewrite from there.

On grammar, typos, and the like I tend to take LLM feedback as read in most cases. Beyond this I think it’s a mistake not to do the legwork yourself, just as you’d have to if you’ve ever worked with a human editor.

But the LLM is helpful because it reduces the cycle time for feedback, which helps maintain momentum - helps me anyway.

> For me I take the view that it’s similar to asking a human for feedback

But it's not asking a human for feedback. That's kind of an important difference, isn't it?

No human tried to understand your writing, and tried to explain their understandings back to you. How much is left of the editorial process then?

It's certainly a difference, but it's a similar kind of conversation to what I'd have had in the past with people about pieces I've written. I.e., where a human tried to understand my writing and explained that understanding back to me, as you've said, only now it's the LLM doing it.

Of course it won't be the same, but it wouldn't be the same if I had the same conversation with multiple different people either, so I'm not sure that's the biggest problem.

The thing is, you can either find this process useful, or you can not find it useful, and I think both of these are valid viewpoints.

I'm simply laying out what works well for me, and I already (I hope) made it clear that it might not work so well for everyone, because to some extent we all work differently.

Yes, of course it does reduce the cycle time. And it certainly can open you up to new areas that you didn't consider.

If you were to ask some friends to give you feedback, they might not have to expertise to propose those new ideas.

Instead, you'd have to explain to them and try to catch them up to speed. It'd be painful, slow, and maybe not result in any direct improvements. Maybe it'd only help you explain to the _next_ friend you have to bother. Maybe you'd decide that you want to be friends with some people knowledgeable in that area.

That's one of the main things I think LLMs are really good at, is isolating us in favor of speed and convenience.

I think you make an interesting point.

I generally don't think LLMs writing prose for humans is a good idea (except for perhaps the most boring kinds of copywriting) but I feel a lot more positive about LLMs as reviewers, even if I don't necessarily use them myself often. My positivity comes from how relatively easy it generally is to validate feedback on a piece of writing you're intimately familiar with.

Gotta say, I don't relate to your concerns about "stray[ing] too far" _in the short term_. I think if reading LLM feedback has upset your original thinking that catastrophically you may have either been wrong (in which case, good that you received feedback early?) or writing with little intention.

However in the long term I can totally see how you could get into a habit of laziness, trusting the LLM to fix your stuff, or mindlessly applying fixes without really considering them.

re: straying too far. I see what you mean but I didn't mean if the feedback itself was to influence your writing

I meant if you were to accept and incorporate the feedback (even if done manually yourself) a handful of times, then at what point have you strayed far enough. Once, twice? If you set it down and revisit, then what if you forget which parts you came up with yourself?

I guess my reasoning here is I never want to guess which is my own ideas/writing. That's too slippery of a slope.

> I guess my reasoning here is I never want to guess which is my own ideas/writing.

Wow! Okay, I wouldn't have guessed that was your concern. How do you feel about feedback from a human editor then? Or is that preferable because it's from a real person? I could empathise with that distinction, TBH.

One of the things I ask AI to help edit my writing is a consistency pass, making sure my ideas hang together well. The real test is to see if other humans understand it.

I tell mine that line editing and formatting are the very last polish.

A consistency pass could be harmless. Though maybe you want to stray a bit?! Depends on the audience I suppose.

Exactly. And maybe publish the list as well.

Don't worry, once you're on one of the naughty lists, it's going to spread by itself. Your domain will never be off of all lists simultaneously, it goes around and you can keep chasing it if it's your domain but you'll never convince everyone before another has copied it again

Most vendors of such lists don't have a contact method, don't respond, or say they're only aggregating a set of secret sources and it's up to me to look for those. Only a handful will actually respond to requests to re-evaluate the allegation, and remove you if it was/is false

Well, yes. That's fine.

Thanks, then I wish the same upon any creation of yours that other people can interact with and use for evil

> I got rid of all my skills and just set it to medium.

Yeah, exactly. I find increasingly little use for skills. I'd put it down to switching projects and stacks a lot but maybe... they just aren't as useful any more?

I wasn’t really using skills but then our project management tool added an MCP so I made a skill for grabbing tickets from the backlog, creating worktrees with the right naming convention, and moving ticket states for me automatically.

At the same time when I’m exploring new feature requests I now use the skill to write up the requirements and estimates into as many tickets as needed.

Massively changed my workflow for me.

I find I am able to get rid of most of the skills just by listing out the style guides the bot should follow in AGENTs.md

any prompt that you’re running a lot, make it a skill. i don’t make a lot of new ones. but still am using ones i made months ago and have been refining.

The thing is, it's not actually that hard to spend at that kind of rate.

I wouldn't say this was the norm, but I have burned through £1k of tokens in a couple of days before. And, on that same gig, I realised a test I was considering running would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours so spent a couple of hours of my own time re-engineering it to get that down to £150.

The point is that I don't necessarily know that spending a shitload of money on tokens really tells us anything useful. If he's getting a return on that investment, fine, whatever.

Obviously most of us couldn't afford to spend that much ourselves, no matter how much value it might deliver, and many of our employers wouldn't be too happy if we spent it on their dime either. Equally, if you can, and it's delivering real value, then I don't see why you wouldn't?

At what point do you buy a Mac studio or AMD Gorgon Halo and try running some of these tasks in local models? Surely don’t need frontier models for all this work.

You definitely don't need frontier models for all this work.

And, in fact, I got it from £2500 to £150 by careful model selection (I ran a trial over a small dataset with different models until I found the least expensive/capable model that would reliably do what I needed), using a local model for one step, and paring down the inputs as well so the token count plummeted.

Yeah I see the same thing at work. Most of the people burning crazy numbers of tokens aren't doing any amazing work. They're just using fable to write their emails and do their web searches.

They feel like they're super smart but it's just as smart as hiring a $500k/yr PhD as a PA to schedule your meetings and answer the phone. Sure it does a good job but you're just wasting money and abilities.

They feel super edgy and bleeding edge but all they really do differently is switching the AI chat from auto to the most expensive option all the time. When I see what they're using it for they're only grasping the basics of its abilities.

They're also people sending 2 page AI generated emails that make no sense for literally everything where a "Yeah sure let's do that" would have sufficed.

Unfortunately most of these are business leaders who just want to look edgy and "all in on AI" so we can't really limit their tokens. Yet they're also the ones saying we spend too much and want to limit some of our dev teams actually putting it to good use.

I tokenmaxxed in my last role.

Management succumbed to AI psychosis, and so we were directed to show that we were adopting and using AI, but what we were using it for was not considered important. So we went out of our way to burn as many tokens as possible.

If you tell Claude to be inefficient and burn as many tokens as it can, it’ll happily oblige. It will also offer useful advice as to how to use even more tokens.

You don't.

Once you factor in cost of electricity and depreciation of hardware, it is more expensive to run locally.

There are many arguments for running local but cost isn't one of them.

> but cost isn't one of them.

Let's do quick back of the napkin math.

  - Mac Studio M5 Ultra, 80-core GPU, 256GB memory, 2TB storage -- $11,299.00.
  - Power (385w continually 100% of month) is $40/mo (my regional) or $480 annually. Let's say power is 3x more expensive in California, which it probably is, that's still only $1,440 annually in power.

The Studio M5 Ultra has a worklife of at least 3 years.

You have to compare with how much Deepseek costs since all the models you will be running will be inferior anyway, certainly not Opus or similar.

it's going to be quite slower than remote providers, won't be able to run full models, only quantised, and for more cost than the highest Claude subscription tier where you can do roughly 60-100M token per month at 200$, e.g. 7200 for three years. It makes sense if you prioritize local AI but not really otherwise sadly.

You have to be using an incredibly small amount of usage for your math to math here. Go price out a few MW or better site then ask a neo cloud how much that same amount of compute will cost at an API.

> would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours

details please, if it's interesting

Evaluation loops do this easily. You have to run hundreds of reasoning jobs in parallel and very quickly you can torch thousands of dollars.

Yeah, it was basically this, and running a whole lot of agents concurrently to churn through the dataset faster.

Yup, run multiple agents on expensive model in loop via API.

You can do it if your employer has endless pockets.

Example: $30/1M input tokens (I don’t count output or cache, for simplification), you have several daily agents for everything => 3M tokens daily per agent * 10 agents ~> $900/day => $328k/year (API spending)

Any 3D work in blender can burn that easily. Add video editing to that mix in any capacity.

If I were spending $200k on tokens then I sure would expect some mind boggling results. I don't know much about what this person is doing with them and maybe they've launched several companies or created several new inventions .... but that's what I'd expect personally at that spend.

> Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.

In software, quite possibly not[0].

But I'm sure we could have built hardware decoders that were up to decoding AV1 or HEVC back in the 90s no problem, had those codecs existed at the time.

[0] Somewhat later than the timeframe we're talking about, but I remember with pain the moment I realised my 600MHz Athlon, with 256MB RAM and 32MB GeForce 256 video card, was thoroughly obsolete because it couldn't decode and play the original Half Life 2 preview without stuttering, screen tearing and, indeed, crashing.

> ... while keeping in mind that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been credibly accused of raping his sister."

He what now?

EDIT: I did a quick Google. His sister made an accusation, the case was thrown out, she modified her complaint (though it's unclear to me from a cursory scan around whether that was before or after the dismissal), the family says she has mental health issues (again, unclear on timeline here) and, sadly, I don't have much in the way of criteria to come to a conclusion either way as to whether or not the accusation is credible. The fact the case has been thrown out suggests not though.

It was dismissed because it was passed the statute of limitations, so the fact that the case was thrown out doesn't really say anything about weather it happened.

Seems like it will be impossible to know either way. Unfortunate situation no matter the truth

Interesting: yeah, that does rather change the interpretation.

> This isn’t the only legal case Annie has been fighting against Sam and her other relatives in recent years. She also successfully sued the family over money left by the Altman siblings’ late father, Jerry Altman, that the family withheld from her for several years.

The family has a grind to pick against her and is defending their golden child.

> He what now?

Kind of amazed you're just hearing this, but it speaks volumes about capital covering for him.

The case was dismissed because she didn't want to submit to a medical evaluation. This is extremely common for chronic rape victims.

https://www.thenerve.news/p/sam-altman-annie-altman-sexual-a...

There's also a case of accusation by a murdered ex-open ai employee who was set to testify against copyright in a openai case. That poor soul's mom has been hateful against Sam since.

The legal bar for a criminal trial is significantly higher than "credible".

> The fact the case has been thrown out suggests not though

A billionaire managing to get a case dismissed in the US legal system hardly suggests an accusation has no merit.

Touche.

I don't know enough about the US legal system to comment but there certainly does sometimes seem to be an element of "whoever has the most money to throw at lawyers wins".

> "whoever has the most money to throw at lawyers wins".

100%. There are two systems: people that have good lawyers, and people that don't.

His sister claims all of the big social media companies are conspiring against her in an attempt to help Altman.

It's not hard to imagine how a person who suffered legitimate abuse at the hands of one of the most influential people on earth could develop this kind of paranoia.

It's only slightly harder to imagine that the tech oligarchy really is conspiring against her.

To be fair the club is pretty small, I'm pretty sure they keep in touch.

Didn't elon bang one of the Google founders wives?

Oligarchs gonna garch.

It just means what they said, that if you're a billionaire, getting a case thrown out in a country like the USA, shouldn't get you any points regarding to common people's belief if you're guilty or not.

That's just how it is. In the US he gets to not go to jail in a justice system where nobody believes he's actually innocent, because he has money.

So, you're saying you care about social media perception rather than actual justice? That checks out..

No, that's why the trial was invented.

So, if he sinks, he's a witch?

The concept of "trial" has changed a lot over time, even in English Common Law.